Imagine a desert in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada.  The soil isn’t soil, it’s alkaline dust that slowly eats at your feet and can be whipped up by the wind into particles so fine you can’t see your hands if you were to hold them out in front of your face.  The day temperatures can be over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), and the night time temperatures can drop to nearly freezing.  There’s no water, no trees, nothing that would entice you to come here and stay for a week or two.  And yet, over 50,000 people (and counting) make the journey to this wasteland every year, to spend a week in the desert at the great performance art piece/insane asylum/party/temporary community/innovative convention/mass orgy/creative festival/gathering known as Burning Man.

Burning Man at dawn

Burning Man is an event unlike any other.  There’s no lineup announced 4 months beforehand (there is music there, but people don’t tend to go just to see the bands or DJs, and it’s likely that you will be distracted by something while your favorite artist is playing and completely miss it).  There are multiple ticket prices, but no special access to anything for the people who buy the higher priced ones.  The festival takes no responsibility for your actions— If you get hurt or die at Burning Man, you and your family cannot sue the festival for gross negligence or anything else.  There is, for the most part, no commerce: you can buy ice and coffee at one location in the entire festival, but beyond that, everyone gifts things to other people— not barter, not a direct trade of one thing for another, but gifts, freely given and/or received, with no obligation to give anything back.  It is also a Leave No Trace event, which means that after the event, not only does everyone take all of their trash away, but a crew of people stay behind and walk the entire event in a line to pick up everything that other people overlook.

I daresay it is impossible to go to Burning Man and come back unchanged.  Having gone for the past two years, I experienced extreme amounts of growth both times (for an account of my personal growth at Burning Man, read my blog Jenna Has No Idea), and saw the people around me go through their own massive journeys.  There are spaces for you to explore nearly every impulse you could dream up, and if there aren’t, you can create your own space for it— There are people teaching workshops on everything from how to tie up your partner in bed, how to give up shame and guilt, how to change your relationship to money, how to hit on women and know what women want, to yoga and dance classes, finding your spiritual power animal, and what it means to be a wiccan.  In the camp I stayed with this year, we hosted over 100 public workshops over the course of the week, not to mention the private ones that were for campmates only.  Some camps gift food or alcohol to eager receivers, others gift haircuts or massages, others gift airbrushing or mini figurines of you captured and printed on a 3D printer.

Attending Burning Man is also an experience of sensory overload:  There are so many art installations, people wearing interesting outfits (or no outfits at all, as the case may be), and vehicles disguised as dragons, dinosaurs, pirate ships, chattering teeth, birds, fish, and more, that you can walk around and experience something visually stimulating 24/7 for the entire week you’re there.  And the visual experience changes entirely at night, when all of a sudden things you’ve seen before in the daytime are lit up in dramatically different ways, and when a piece of art burns, which happens usually on the last five nights of the event, including burning an effigy of the Man on Saturday and the temple on Sunday.

Burning Man is a place to find out who you really are and who you want to be, unencumbered by your job, societal expectations, class boundaries, education levels, etc.  You can run into anyone at Burning Man, including movie stars, CEOs of fortune 500 companies (Bill Gates has been to Burning Man), famous musicians and artists, writers for tech magazines, video game designers, fashion designers, and me!    It’s definitely not the right place for everyone— if you need 3 showers a day and can’t sleep when there’s dirt in your bed, you may be miserable— but it’s the right place for people who want to push their boundaries, connect with something extraordinary, and live life to the fullest.  It’s a place for the brave, the dreamers, the artists, the expanded souls, and the ever hopeful.  And if you want to let out some pent up aggression, there’s a thunderdome for that.

So if you haven’t started planning to go yet, what’s stopping you?

Lighting the dynamite,

Jenna